Getting started with pandas

Python’s pandas library can make your data or programming life easier because it enables painless ingestion, exporting, transformation, and visualization of your data. It’s no surprise then that pandas is very popular among data scientists, quants, Excel junkies, and Python developers. But if you're only familiar with Python, you may encounter a few gotchas as you get started with pandas.

Join Matt Harrison to jumpstart your pandas journey. By the end of this three-hour hands-on course, you’ll be importing, exploring, and tweaking data with pandas, using the Jupyter Notebook as the basis for your exploratory analysis. You’ll also be prepared for the second course in this series, Mastering pandas, where you’ll learn more advanced skills, such as filtering, plotting, and pivoting your data.

About your instructor

Matt runs MetaSnake, a Python and Data Science training and consulting company. He has over 15 years of experience using Python across a breadth of domains: Data Science, BI, Storage, Testing and Automation, Open Source Stack Management, and Search.

Schedule

The timeframes are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing

Set up and introduction to Jupyter (15 minutes)

Lecture: Jupyter features

Introduction to pandas (10 minutes)

Lecture: pandas basic data structures

Loading data (25 minutes)

Lecture: Ingesting data from the web and CSV files; exploring some of the options for manipulation during loading

Hands-on exercise: Load data

Break (10 minutes)

Inspecting data (30 minutes)

Lecture: Examining your data, characterizing it, and seeing what it looks like

Hands-on exercise: Inspect your data

Tweaking data (30 minutes)

Lecture: Changing the types of the values for your data, fixing them, or ignoring them

Hands-on exercise: Tweak your data

Break (10 minutes)

Basic stats (40 minutes)

Lecture: The functionality that pandas provides to easily look at descriptive analytics for your data